CHINA AND THE CONTINUING RELEVANCE OF SOCIALISM

 CHINA AND THE CONTINUING RELEVANCE OF SOCIALISM (This article bad been already published in spanish in La Tecla Ñ Review froma Buenos Aires

Mariano Ciafardini
“Marxism points the way forward for human society. It is a powerful theoretical weapon that enables us to understand the world and its underlying tendencies, seek truth, and change the world. Marxism is not a set of rigid dogmas but a guide to action that must evolve as circumstances change.” —Xi Jinping, 2022
In all honesty, for any specialist in international affairs, whatever their ideological outlook, the proposition suggested by this title is the central geopolitical question of our time, even when it remains unspoken. The possibility it raises is the greatest fear of those who dream of capitalism continuing indefinitely, particularly those who grow wealthy from it. It is also the greatest source of hope for those who aspire to a socialist world, some of whom have only recently recovered from the blow dealt by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The People’s Republic of China repeatedly states that it has no intention of imposing any political or social system on anyone, or of interfering in the internal affairs of any country, and its conduct bears this out. What it does explicitly advocate is a “community with a shared future for humanity.” Could an advanced capitalist country belong to such a community? Nothing explicit is said on this point, although the proposal appears to envisage a community that excludes no one. If so, what kind of community would it be? The very concepts of “community” and a “shared future” clash with the DNA of actually existing capitalism, let alone the liberalism of the Austrian School.
What is beyond doubt is that China, besides representing an unprecedented economic and political phenomenon, is promoting industrial, commercial, and even financial development across a substantial number of countries in the so-called Global South. The development of the productive forces is a fundamental prerequisite for the establishment of socialism. Another reason to think that China keeps open the question of Marxism’s continuing relevance and the possibility of socialism worldwide is the resistance it encounters from the leading capitalist powers and major international financial actors. From this perspective, many of these actors would seemingly welcome a weakening of China, provided it did not jeopardize their own interests. Those who advance this interpretation regard this dynamic as well understood by intelligence services and agencies specializing in strategic analysis.
Turning to the theoretical validity of Marxism—and, by extension, to all genuinely left-wing political positions—whether China serves, even unintentionally, as an example of socialism has fundamental ideological implications for the validity of Marxism and historical materialism.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was proclaimed, among other things, as a failure of these theories. The principal argument was that if, after more than 150 years, a theory had failed to achieve its objective of worldwide expansion, producing instead an experiment lasting “only” seventy years that ended in a return to capitalism in present-day Russia, this alone would render it a utopia, like those of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French socialists whom Marxism itself criticized. The interpretation would be different, however, if China were understood to have “taken up the baton” of twentieth-century socialism and to be carrying it forward under the particular conditions of the twenty-first century, even unintentionally. In that case, although the process had taken far longer than Marx and Engels, or even Lenin, imagined, the possibility of a socialist world—of socialism as an actual historical reality—would remain open.
One way of approaching the question posed by the title is through the Marxist concept already mentioned: the development of the productive forces, to which the founders of Marxism attached crucial importance. In The German Ideology, Marx argued that communism could, empirically, emerge only through the concurrent or simultaneous action of the dominant peoples, presupposing the universal development of the productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with them. Marx was speaking of Europe. Today, the world is different.
From this standpoint, we could not simply say that Soviet socialism failed. Rather, it would have been an attempt to establish socialism—or a way of confronting capitalism on a world scale—specific to the twentieth century, when the world’s productive forces were not yet sufficiently developed. Its dissolution would therefore signify not the failure of socialism but a transition to a different form of socialist country, exemplified by the present-day People’s Republic: one that adapts to twenty-first-century circumstances and is now developing the productive forces on a vast scale. The path toward a worldwide socialist victory would thus remain open, and Marxism, albeit with modifications that leave its fundamental structure intact, would neither have lost its validity nor have become a utopian doctrine.
It is true that the leading developers of the productive forces in the twentieth century were the capitalist United States and Western Europe, the latter assisted by the Marshall Plan. The Soviet Union, it must be acknowledged, also made its contribution. It was precisely this enormous development of the productive forces that transformed the industrial form of capital accumulation characteristic of twentieth-century capitalism, ushering in its present, higher and final stage of financial accumulation.
Today, the principal driving force behind the development of the productive forces is China, which describes itself as socialist and also promotes their development worldwide. Meanwhile, the relations of production in crisis—a crisis seemingly rendered terminal by the perverse dynamics of financialization—are those of the capitalist countries, especially the most developed.
Historical time does not follow the brief timescales of individual human lives. Although more than 150 years have passed since the publication of The Communist Manifesto, subsequent events would simply suggest that the process has taken longer than the founders of Marxism imagined, while the path toward socialism continues today with better prospects.
For the entire world to move toward a socialist system without exploitation or systemic violence, bringing to a close approximately 100,000 years of human history beginning with tribal warfare, a transitional process commensurate with that historical timescale is clearly required: a long and complex one.
To reiterate, if the Soviet experience were indeed the failure of a mistaken, utopian theory, and contemporary China were simply another expression of capitalism, sharing its exploitative and warlike characteristics, then intellectual honesty, free of dogmatic fanaticism, would require us to seriously question the work of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the many others who advocated a worldwide transformation toward socialism and communism.
But if the October Revolution of 1917 and the Soviet Union that emerged from it are understood as a first historical attempt—or a second, if the Paris Commune is included—undertaken in a world where the productive forces required to sustain a socialist and communist society had not yet developed sufficiently, the process might be assessed differently. From this perspective, that attempt would find historical continuity in the People’s Republic of China, a country that has undergone one of the most extraordinary processes of productive development in modern history. In just a few decades, China has achieved levels of industrialization, modernization, and innovation that took the leading capitalist powers far longer to attain. Furthermore, any assessment of the material conditions necessary for the eventual construction of worldwide socialism would have to consider not only China’s development but also that of other formerly underdeveloped countries and, to some extent, the advanced capitalist economies themselves. After all, the productive forces, considered in themselves, have no particular ideology.
We could therefore argue that the famous condition of a worldwide development of the productive forces is now being fulfilled, regardless of the ideological orientation or declared political intentions of national governments, including those of the advanced capitalist countries. From this standpoint, humanity’s present productive forces may already be beginning to provide a sufficient material basis for the long-awaited socialism proclaimed in the mid-nineteenth century.
Admittedly, a particular and highly complex circumstance must be added to this picture: if socialism were to triumph worldwide, all eight billion people would have their basic needs met—assuming it were socialism in any meaningful sense. This would inevitably require a radical transformation of consumption patterns, because the planet could not withstand the carbon emissions and environmental destruction generated by a population of that size living according to the standards of today’s middle classes. This would be a central issue for a community with a shared future for humanity, requiring it to rise to the challenge and implement plans to avert such an outcome. And time is running out. In this regard, it should be noted that China is by far the largest producer of renewable energy systems, while its per capita emissions, despite its role as the workshop of the world, place it twenty-first, compared with fourteenth place for the United States. Global planning to transform patterns of consumption, and therefore production, sounds more like socialism than capitalism.
We might ask: where are the political indicators that the world is moving toward socialism? As already suggested, if the transformation envisaged by Marxism entails ending not merely a mode of production such as capitalism but an entire era of the exploitation of human beings by other human beings—to use Marx’s formulation—with the immensely complex ecological question now added to it, the political signs of that transformation will emerge gradually, through a process that, as noted above, will be lengthy and complex. This is not merely a crisis of capitalism; it is a crisis of civilization.
Nevertheless, some indicators are already discernible. That capitalism has entered its most parasitic and decadent phase, the financial stage, is something no one can deny. This dominant form of capital accumulation has led it into a profound industrial and commercial crisis, and the resulting social crises and uprisings are already beginning to emerge. Another sign of the major transformation that may lie ahead is that the military offensives that proved effective during the period of the “end of history”—from the late 1980s to the early 2000s—are no longer the military sightseeing tours they once were. For example, the US military-industrial complex pushed Trump into a headlong confrontation with an Iran, supported politically and economically by China, whose strength had been arrogantly underestimated.
Particular consideration must also be given to the existence and steadily growing geopolitical power of a country such as China, governed by a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party, together with its global allies. To this we should add that, should the very possible military and political victory of Russia over NATO on Ukrainian territory materialize, the global geopolitical landscape would undergo a tectonic shift, especially in Western Europe. Although Russia is not a socialist country, the strategic character of the Sino-Russian axis is widely recognized. Russia is also a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which encompasses agreements and activities involving military and security cooperation, and of BRICS, and it participates in the Belt and Road Initiative. In 2015, China and Russia agreed to coordinate the Belt and Road Initiative with the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, whose other members are Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan. One of the most important projects is the China–Mongolia–Russia Economic Corridor, intended to develop infrastructure, transport, and trade among the three countries.
Clearly, the present is not an era of unambiguous socialist revolutions such as Russia’s October Revolution of 1917, China’s revolution of 1949, Cuba’s of 1959, or the Vietnamese revolution. But the arena of struggle today is the entire world, and economic, political, and social conditions are very different. The ideological question is far from having dissolved into any “end of history.”
None of this is intended to suggest that an explicit, China-led strategy exists to bring the world to socialism. Rather, the Chinese phenomenon, its worldwide commercial and industrial strategy, the growing number of countries joining its global projects, capitalism’s generalized crisis, and the social and political movements emerging from that crisis with increasing energy all give us reason to reflect.
Mariano Ciafardini
PhD in Social Sciences, University of Buenos Aires
Héctor Agosti Center for Marxist Studies and Education, Buenos Aires